Matt Dallman guided his four-wheel drive truck up a narrow, snow-covered road in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Forest County. Dallman, the director of conservation for the Nature Conservancy in Wisconsin, pointed to a cluster or stand of red pines, which would soon be converted into two-by-four boards as part a program he’s spearheading.
“The Nature Conservancy is managing 380 acres here,” Dallman said. “We’re going to be harvesting just short of 2 million board feet, and that will equate to about $370,000 of revenue.”
It’s a new role for the Nature Conservancy, which Dallman said is often stereotyped as a “tree-hugging organization.” The Conservancy now finds itself in the lumberjack business. “I’m not here to say that we need every tree cut. I think we need old places and we need places that are being managed,” Dallman said, “While we want some places preserved, we also want places for jobs and the economy.”
The 2014 Farm Bill allowed the U.S. Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy to enter into this stewardship agreement, just one of 13 nationwide. TNC is hiring the loggers, selling the timber, and then using the proceeds for projects the Forest Service can’t afford to do.
Dallman pulled over by Simpson Creek, a fast running, narrow stream whose spring-fed waters had not frozen over in the long, cold winter. “It’s a trout stream that was pretty much beat up from the old logging era. You used to catch 15-inch brook trout in here,” Dallman said. “Then they floated logs down it, and it got dammed up.” With the money from the timber sale, TNC is planning to restore the stream by re-routing the channel, and exposing the gravel bottom the fish need for spawning.
Read more on this from Wisconsin Public Radio at https://www.wpr.org/stewardship-agreement-brings-together-tree-huggers-and-lumberjacks.